A Day in the Life of a Maintenance Engineer

In this article, we will be discussing A Day in the Life of a Maintenance Engineer at the workplace. A maintenance engineer either works in shifts or in General shifts. The schedule for both remains the same or different depending on the organization’s culture. In general, some organizations have different PM (Preventive maintenance) teams and some organizations have different Shift handling teams (attending breakdowns, any leftover PM jobs, and some corrective actions they take).

Starting of the Day for a Shift Engineer

The day of a maintenance engineer starts early morning as they have to go to the company early morning around 06:00 am (Depends on the organization). Then, as a supervisor of the shift, they took charge from the previous shift supervisor, is everything ok, is there any pending breakdown, any message to convey to team members, etc., and then they generally take a plant round if everything is working ok or having some issues with the machine or anything else. The maintenance team, also do the CLIRT at the start of the shift so that any abnormality, lubrication, or tightening can be done prior to failure of the machine.

KPIs of Maintenance Engineer

After the plant round, the maintenance supervisor has to work on their KPI which includes the following parameters.

MTTR

The maintenance supervisor has to maintain the data of the breakdowns and note the time as well. Then, MTTR is calculated. MTTR should be lower. It signifies a lot of things which you can read here.

MTBF

MTBF also is maintained by the maintenance supervisor just like they maintain the MTTR. MTBF also signifies a lot of things that can be read here.

Uptime

Uptime is the total amount of time a machine actually runs versus the time it was scheduled to run. Uptime is also an important maintenance metric.

Spare Parts Inventory

Without spare parts, an organization’s downtime cost will be very high. So, a maintenance engineer keeps a track of all the spares that are used in Preventive maintenance and which spares have been used in the breakdown and predictive maintenance. On the basis of that, a maintenance engineer will calculate the cost of spares used in the Breakdown, the cost of spares used in Preventive maintenance, and the cost of spares used in predictive maintenance.

Energy Data

Apart from doing the above different jobs, a maintenance engineer also works on calculating the energy consumed per product in the industry. Not only, do they calculate the cost per product, but they also take some initiatives on energy-saving projects along with their team members. It is also considered the most important KPI and is highly rewarded.

Negotiation

In some industries, the maintenance spares procurement is under the maintenance department. So, a maintenance engineer should also have negotiation skills, so that they could negotiate with the vendor and procure the spares at a low cost which will be under the cost-saving KPI.

Training

In addition to the all above jobs, a maintenance supervisor conducts training or arranges training from outside professionals in their field. As this part is also considered in the KPI. Providing training to the team, will enhance their knowledge, which in turn helps to reduce downtime, solve problems in lesser time, optimization of resources, and open up new opportunities.

Documentation

The documentation part includes a lot of things for maintenance engineers. They have to make documents for ISO, EHS, IATF, and many others depending on the industry type. It took a lot of time for an engineer to maintain documents. For this, they update all the work on the assigned format of the ISO, ES, etc. For example, whenever a maintenance person does any PM, then the PM check sheet is given to the technician and they do the PM accordingly. These documents have given a format number. After that, these documents are kept in the maintenance to show to the internal and external auditors. If there is any revision of the document, then the revision number is also mentioned on the documents.

End of the Shift

During the end of the shift, the maintenance engineer will compile all the jobs done and pending jobs. Then he has to update it to their team members through an email. So that all will be updated and then he hands over the shift to the next shift maintenance engineer.

Some Hardships of Maintenance Engineers at Work

• Sometimes there is a major failure of the machine and there is a lot of pressure to resume the machine back to production within the minimum possible time.
• Sometimes a maintenance engineer has to skip his meal because of a sudden breakdown or there is a delay in having the meal. It’s not because the company does not provide food but it is because of the dedication of a maintenance engineer to resume the machine.
• Sometimes there is data required by management that you have to make and submit urgently.
• Also, if your plant is in a remote area and you have to identify all the critical spares and keep them in stock.

So, this is the day in the life of a maintenance engineer. If any important activity is left out, kindly comment down below, and we will try to include it in the post. Also, comment down, how much time do you spend on these maintenance activities in a single day?